You’re still in my head. You keep re-entering my conscious mind as it tries to pass you by. You’ve made me as much as I’ve made you. We serve as each other’s leading men in the films of our lives. We allow for each other to be unreal.

You don’t get vaccinated for this outbreak thing.

You just don’t go get it.

You avoid it like the plague.

I followed the call of freedom.

I finally obeyed that voice from the West.

Besides, I’ve wanted off the grid my whole life.

The Woman and the Boy, well they took to the wilderness too.

No foaming at the mouth and eating corpses for those two.

And I said: “Come on in.”

It gets lonely at the edge of the Earth.

You ask yourself, “How can it get so lonely?”

And then, after the end of everything, you find out.

She had to wind up here…

… cause if you wanna be free, this is where you go.

I remember these lines I gave you while imagining the future past, your existence, your madness and allegorical complexity. Now I can’t remember who I was before I ever thought of you.

All I had to do was wait…… near the tidal-pools, next to the abandoned something or other, on this little island of nothing.

I sat there in the afternoons and drank beer when I could scavenge it.

I used to sit there half-asleep with a beer and the darkness…

I wanted to tell the world I found this Woman and Boy but the world didn’t exist no more…

The telegraph office was closed for a permanent siesta.

I’ve been glad about it really.

I knew I’d go every night to feed them from my stash.

… and I knew they knew it.

I sat there and drank bourbon, when I could find some, and I shut my eyes…

I tried not to think of the city from before, or the city as I’d last seen it, rummaging for booze and food.

I knew where I was and what I was doing.

I just thought what a sucker I was.

I even knew she might never come to me in the night…

… but I sat there, grinding it out.

The Vancouver Winter Olympics came and went — so has any separation between the apocalyptic outbreak I imagined spawning from its ghetto fringes and the ongoing confusion of our present moments. Our city keeps erasing itself for the benefit of people who don’t exist for us. They’re not in our scripts.

We seemed to live by night.

What was left of the day went away like a pack of cigarettes you smoked.

I treasured the cartons I found in abandoned cottages, boats, looted gas stations.

I don’t know if others lived.

I’ve never bothered to find out.

All I’ve ever had to go on is my appetites and memories — so what makes what?

I don’t know what we’ve been waiting for.

Maybe we thought the world would end for us too.

Maybe we thought it was a dream…

… and we’d wake up with a hangover.

Every night I went to meet the Woman and the Boy.

How did I know they’d keep showing up?

I didn’t.

What stopped them from taking the boat away from here?

Nothing.

How big a chump can you get to be?

I was finding out.

I’m your Noir Dream as much as you’ve been mine. We hold each other’s inarticulate longing in trust. We want to own a hardboiled, ironic distance that beckons to us always from out of the past — the past as representation.

They’d come along like school was out and everything else was just a stone you sailed at the sea.

One little lamp burned.

It was all right.

And the rain hammering like that on the window made it good to be in there.

It wasn’t all a lie.

And I was on it too.

We kept pretty much to ourselves.

We were on the run.

We went to places we never would’ve seen in our lives.

The smell of rotting flesh was horrible in the city.

And after awhile, we grew a little more sure of ourselves.

We drifted back to more familiar places, ballparks, movie theatres, bars and the racetracks.

Why not?

After all, there wasn’t one chance in a million we’d bump into our past — one chance in a gazillion.

When it seemed right, we’d blow into some ruins to find what we needed.

I wasn’t bad at the game myself.

We want to haunt the cinema of our pairing — the nostalgia machine that makes us.

I was sure I had shaken the Old World loose, and I felt good.

Often it was like meeting somewhere on a date, like in the times before.

There was still that something that got me.

A kind of magic or whatever it was.

We’d played it smart and forgotten nothing — forgotten nothing except one thing.

The past was still with us in bits and pieces, like glass in your shoe or dirt in your coffee, always.

Oh God. Coffee…

The time before has remained in fragments of film, pixels, invisible emissions and mystery tape, taunting brain cells commandeered by long-dead forces, memories that were never ours to begin with.